Making Learning Public with QR Codes

At the end of last school year, we had a few of our teachers experimenting with QR codes. We see QR codes having great potential for making student learning public - that is, using QR codes to share student work along with student self-assessments and reflections within our learning environment. You can read more about QR codes at our school here.

As an example, we have begun to use QR codes to document student learning in the fine arts. Students can create multimedia 'artist statements' such as the video example below. These students can then create exhibitions of their work within our school, accompanied by the QR code. Our goal is to increase the visibility of student learning and to make our school a dynamic site of student expression.

Building Personal Connection to History

At the end of last school year, one of our grade 5 humanities teachers, Tanya Stogre, engaged her students in a lengthy study of Canadian history designed to nurture personal connection with figures from our countries past.

Over the course of a few months, students selected and researched a figure from Canadian history who they personally identified with based on their characteristics, struggles, accomplishments, and life story. Students demonstrated their connection with this historical figure in a number of ways including the recreation of diary entries, museum installations and a podcast interview with the historical figure. As a summarizing representation of their findings these grade 5 students each created a unique identity puzzle piece which shared the connections they felt was a historical figure.

To house all of this work, each student was given the opportunity to create their own personal webpage about their figure, which was then assembled into a class website sharing the stories of these 50 figures from Canadian history.

Click here to visit the project website.

This video tells the story of the project from the teacher's perspective.